Croiffle: The verdict

On my way home from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting last week, this advert on the train (too late, I was already on my way to Kent at this point) offered me a free speciality coffee with purchase of their new 'croiffle'.

Advert offering a free coffee if you buy a 'croiffle'

A croiffle?, you might ask. And what is a croiffle? Using my linguistic skills, honed over the course of the last fifteen years of intensive linguistic training, I intuited that it is a croissant of some kind (see image) with something unspeakable done to it. Obviously this is a blend, or portmanteau, of croissant and, I assume, waffle, as it's apparently been toasted in a waffle machine. Why you would do this, I do not know.

But how do you pronounce it? While I and a friend both went with the vowel of croissant (slightly different for each of us, with his being more similar to the French than mine (/ɒ/ vs /ʌ/)), another friend said it as she saw it and used the oi of, well, Oi!. And a portmanteau that no one knows how to pronounce is an unsuccessful new word, especially if it's also just a toasted croissant that's a bit bumpy.

I stan for eponymous words

"The dark side of gay stan culture" is the subject of a Guardian article today. It's about the link between gay men and female pop star divas like Ariana Grande, Beyonce, etc, and how it's often couched in criticism, either overt or implied, of those stars' songs, attitude or appearance. Anyway, point is, it says this about the word stan:

[It's a] portmanteau of "fan" and "stalker" taken from Eminem's hit about a crazed follower.

Now then. That sounded off immediately. I can well believe it's a portmanteau of those words, and I can also believe it's from the Eminem song, but both? No. The character in the song is called Stan, and there was no suggestion that he's called that because it's a portmanteau. He just is.

Approximately one second of googling returned a link that says exactly what the Guardian says, attributed to Urban Dictionary. And Urban Dictionary does indeed say both of those things, but in different definitions. Urban Dictionary is compiled by people who submit entries, so any one word can have any number of definitions, frequently repetitive and of very variable quality. In this case, many of them say it's from the song, and one says it's a portmanteau. There's no real way to know which is true, either, though with new words like this it often is the thing that most people think it is.

I actually assumed it was from stand, with consonant cluster simplification at the end of the word, because I've much more often heard it as the verb, as in I stan (for) Beyonce. I hadn't even considered the Eminem origin, maybe because it's so long since that song (Stan was released in 2000) and I've only really noticed this word in the last year or two. But the Bustle article I linked above says that the word has actually been around since then - just not in mainstream use (it says it's been related to K-Pop, for instance). This is the recency illusion: words are always waaaaay older than you think they are.

Quasar and portmanteaus

I learnt recently that the word quasar is a portmanteau from quasi-stellar. A portmanteau is a word made from bits of two other words, the canonical example being brunch (from breakfast and lunch). We have lots of them, and they tend to be a bit silly, like spork or celebrity nicknames like Jedward. Interestingly, Tanzania is a portmanteau, from Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the two countries that made up the new independent republic.

What struck me about quasar is that it's a noun (it's a very energetic and distant active galactic nucleus, according to Wikipedia), but it's formed from an adjective (quasi-stellar). Looking into it, it's quickly obvious that it's because quasi-stellar is only part of a longer noun phrase, quasi-stellar radio source. Presumably, bods at quasar research facilities referred to them first by their full name, then pretty quickly shortened it to quasi-stellar (the radio source part can be assumed, after all, when what you do is look at radio sources) and then that was the part that got blended.